You can silence one, but you can't silence us all. EDL return to Dagenham

The report I wrote on yesterday's demo in Dagenham (the fourth by EDL) is on the New English review, repeated on the EDL website and dotted around Facebook. So I won't repeat it, but I will show you some extra photographs.

At Chadwell Heath station after the minute's silence.

Pick those feet up you 'orrible little 'men'.

In Valance Avenue, regrouping after the incident - deal with by the stewards.

At the demo site outside the mosque everything was in readiness.

Coming down Green Lane - the Infidel of the EDL.

Speeches by Kev Carroll, someone whose name I didn't catch (sorry) and Diane leader of Dagenham Division.

The worst of the rain held off until the very end when the heavens opened with Hailstones. Then it was time to return to the muster point, where we were made very welcome.

Police 'covered up' violent campaign to turn London area 'Islamic'

Andrew Gilligan in the Sunday Telegraph. Many of the the individual incidents he cites have been covered elsewhere; the EDL forum, Facebook, this blog, the New English Review. However his articulating the collusion of the police and CPS (my opinion of them was low from the very beginning, and has spent 20 years plummeting) is alarming.

Victims say that officers in the borough of Tower Hamlets have ignored or downplayed outbreaks of hate crime, and suppressed evidence implicating Muslims in them, because they fear being accused of racism.
The claims come as four Tower Hamlets Muslims were jailed for at least 19 years for attacking a local white teacher who gave religious studies lessons to Muslim girls.
The Sunday Telegraph has uncovered more than a dozen other cases in Tower Hamlets where both Muslims and non-Muslims have been threatened or beaten for behaviour deemed to breach fundamentalist “Islamic norms.”

Teachers in several local schools have told The Sunday Telegraph that they feel “under pressure” from local Muslim extremists, who have mounted campaigns through both parents and pupils – and, in one case, through another teacher - to enforce the compulsory wearing of the veil for Muslim girls. “It was totally orchestrated,” said one teacher. “The atmosphere became extremely unpleasant for a while, with constant verbal aggression from both the children and some parents against the head over this issue.”

Even during meetings of the local council, prominent supporters of Tower Hamlets’ controversial directly-elected mayor, Lutfur Rahman – dropped by the Labour Party for his links to Islamic fundamentalism - have persistently targeted gay councillors with homophobic abuse and intimidation from the public gallery.

The Labour leader, Josh Peck, was attacked with animal noises and cries of “Unnatural acts! Unnatural acts!” when he rose to speak. The Conservative leader, Peter Golds, was repeatedly heckled as “Mrs Golds” and a “poofter”. It is a source of some wonder to me that Tower Hamlets retains an opposition on its council - all opposition was wiped out last year in LB Newham and LB Barking and Dagenham.

Mr Golds said: “If that happened in a football stadium, arrests would have taken place. I have complained, twice, to the police, and have heard nothing. A Labour colleague waited three hours at the police station before being told that nothing would be done. The police are afraid of being accused of Islamophobia. Another Labour councillor said that the Met is now the reverse of what it must have been like in the 1970s, (oh, this myth of the 70s - stop trying to infer that this is something we deserve for past perceived misdemeanours) with a complete lack of interest when white people make complaints of harassment and hatred.”

. . . the East London Mosque, Tower Hamlets’ most prominent Muslim institution. Although the mosque claims to be against extremism, discrimination, and violence, it has hosted dozens of hate, extremist or terrorist preachers and also hosted a “Spot The Fag” contest. In the same week that it issued a press release condemning the anti-gay stickers, the mosque was also due to host a “gala dinner” with Uthman Lateef, a homophobic hate preacher.

The mosque is controlled by a fundamentalist group, the Islamic Forum of Europe, which says that it is dedicated to changing the “very infrastructure of society, its institutions, its culture, its political order and its creed ... from ignorance to Islam.”

The IFE’s community affairs co-ordinator, Azad Ali, is chairman of the Muslim Safety Forum, an organisation officially recognised by the Met as its “principal [liaison] body in relation to Muslim community safety.” Mr Golds said: “This relationship may explain the police’s feebleness.”

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said: “When any allegation of crime is made to us, we investigate appropriately. We will always take action against hate crime in accordance with, and within the confines of, the law.”

Gothenburg - May 25th 2011

The EDL went to Gothenburg last month to support our Swedish friends in the launch of the SDL and their protest against a new mosque. Members of London division were there; these are a small selection of photographs from the day.

Muslim fanatic fined £100 for 'gay free zone' stickers

From The Telegraph

Mohammed Hasnath, 18, posted stickers warning gays that homosexuality was wrong and that "Allah is severe in punishment". The stickers showed a rainbow flag with a black line through it stating "Gay free zone".


Hasnath, who is on benefits, admitted putting up a handful of the notes but said he had been given them, and pointed out there were "hundreds" of similar offensive stickers in the area.


Darren Watts, prosecuting, said: "This is in relation to a series of homophobic stickers put up around the East End area in February."

The stickers, which were posted at Bow Church DLR, on the inside of a bus, at a bus stop in Whitechapel and outside the Royal London Hospital, showed a rainbow flag with a black line through it. Above the flag was printed "Arise and warn" and below it said "And fear Allah: Verily Allah is severe in punishment." Both were followed by references to the English version of the Koran. In October my own daughter was one of the first to photograph a sticker (above) as evidence of what was going on.

Mr Watts told Westminster Magistrates Court that Hasnath was arrested after he was spotted on CCTV putting up the sticker at Bow Church and confessed to police he had also been handing them out to young Muslim men in the area.

In a statement read to the court Jack Gilbert, a board member of the Sandys Row Synagogue and co chair of the Rainbow Hamlets community forum, said: "For me I read this no differently from a sign that said 'Jew free zone'. When I see that sticker I see the signs my mother saw in 1930 which actually carried less suggestion of punishment. For me I perceived an immediate threat of violence and had to make an instant risk assessment to my personal safety."

The statement of a police officer working in the East End read to the court added: "I felt upset and offended. It made me feel I shouldn't be working in the area and it should be a gay free zone. As far as I am concerned I should feel free and at peace to work in my community."

When told the allegation against him of a public order offence of using threatening or abusive words or behaviour between February 11 and 14 Hasnath said: "But I just put up stickers, I didn't harass or swear at anybody or anything. Basically, some people just handed them to me so I just put them up. I didn't say anything, it doesn't say that I am going to punish them it just says what God says in the Koran. I wasn't the one who made them, some people gave them to me and I only put up a few, there were hundreds of them up . . . "

Hasnath, who was representing himself, pleaded guilty to the offence. Remember the knee jerk reaction in certain 'liberal' quarters? That a 'right wing' group, aka the EDL were putting them up to ferment discord.

District Judge Coleman said: "I think you used these stickers deliberately to offend and distress people, you certainly succeeded in doing that".

The court heard that Hasnath is on bail for allegedly defacing a women's fashion advertising board. We know, somebody gave him a pot of black paint and everybody else was at it.